The Hooch Learning Studio, in conjunction with Ms. Balogh’s ESOL students, is delighted to announce the publication of Twelve Worlds, One Book. This book is an anthology of student writing created by Ms. Balogh’s students crafted as part of the work they crafted in Ms. Balogh’s writer’s workshop approach to composition instruction. The book contains […]

In my previous post, I outlined the crisis of credibility that has beset scholarly information. In this post I present the first in a series of posts explaining the GeSTE windows model for the critical evaluation of information (Lupton 2008, Lupton & Bruce 2010). The GeSTE windows is a way of seeing information literacy as Generic, […]

Here we go again – another ‘company’ moving into the education arena to provide access to ‘content’ and/or house shared resources. This time it’s Amazon.

Amazon has unveiled it’s shiny new offering – an online education service for teachers called Amazon Inspire .

By introducing its new education site, Amazon joins other tech industry giants in an enormous push to expand the use of technology in public schools. It’s all about the market territory really, under the guise of support. Aggregated repositories have been around for ‘like forever’ in the digital realm, and have come in many guises. But the biggest always have dollars attached to them for the providing company – creating brand allegiance. Or am I being too cynical? Who knows.

In the school market, however, Amazon is competing not just with rival tech companies but also with established digital education companies and ed tech start-ups. A number of popular platforms already offer instructional materials for teachers. Among them are tes.com, a site based in London with more than eight million users worldwide, and teacherspayteachers.com, a site based in Manhattan that more than two million teachers use regularly.

The New York Times clearly explains:

Called Amazon Inspire, the education site has features that may seem familiar to frequent Amazon shoppers. Search bar at the top of the page? Check. User reviews? Check. Star ratings for each product? Check.

By starting out with a free resources service for teachers, Amazon is establishing a foothold that could expand into a one-stop shopping marketplace — not just for paid learning materials, but for schools’ wider academic and institutional software needs, said Tory Patterson, co-founder of Owl Ventures, a venture capital fund that invests in ed tech start-ups. Amazon is joining other tech industry giants in a push to expand the use of technology in the public schools.

Even so, ed tech industry analysts said the growing market for digital educational materials, which Amazon is entering, is likely to prove much more valuable over time than the school computer market.

Already, nursery through high schools in the United States spend more than $8.3 billion annually on educational software and digital content, according to estimates from the Software and Information Industry Association, a trade group. That spending could grow significantly as school districts that now buy physical textbooks, assessment tests, professional development resources for teachers and administrative materials shift to digital systems.

Don’t worry – not on offer for Australia as yet, so no hard hitting decisions to be made (chortle).

They’re calling out to teachers and institutions to request early access. But is there any content there already that Amazon has invested time/money – or is it just going to be a swap shop?

Forget it. There are better places on offer!

I’m quite sure that time, thought and quality people are needed. That’s why our own home-grown ABC Splashprovides such a fabulous resource, with great stuff for teachers, as well as great resources and games for students. Visit ABC SPLASH – don’t miss out on the gorgeous site managed by my inspiring colleague @AnnabelAstbury.

Looking for some new ideas for tools to support your work? Here are the links to the pages in Jane Hart’s Directory of Learning & PerformanceTools, which lists over 1,000 tools in 4 main categories as shown below.

What are your favourite tools for learning? Voting is now open in this year’s Top Tools for Learning survey. Please share your own.

Amazingly, 2016 marks the 10th anniversary of the Top 100 Tools for Learning list compiled by Jane Hart from the votes of learning professionals around the world – from both education and workplace training. This year there will be a few changes:

Due to the fact that the same tools have dominated the list in recent years, for 2016 the list will be extended to contain 200 tools so that more tools can be mentioned to create the Top 200 Tools for Learning 2016

Additionally, in order to understand how these tools are being used in different contexts, three sub-lists will also be generated:

Top 100 Tools for Education (K-12 to Adult Ed) 2016

Top 100 Tools for Workplace Learning (Training, Performance Support & Social Collaboration) 2016

Current online information environments and associated transactions are considered an important ‘information ecosystem’ (Haythornthwaite & Andrews, 2011, p in ch 8) influencing and shaping professional engagement and digital scholarship in communities of learning in the higher education sector (Lee, McLoughlin & Chan, 2008). This kind of information ecosystem is also considered to be social in practice and making use of use of participatory technologies and online social networks to share, reflect, critique, improve, and validate academic engagement and scholarship (Veletsianos & Kimmons, 2012, p.768).

Thanks to advances in technology, the powerful tools at our disposal to help students understand and learn in unique ways are enabling new ways of producing, searching and sharing information and knowledge (Conole, 2013). By leveraging technology, we have the opportunity to open new doors to scholarly inquiry for ourselves and our students. While practical recommendations for a wide variety of ways of working with current online technologies is easily marketed and readily adopted, there is insufficient connection to digital scholarship in the creation of meaning and knowledge as an action of digital scholarship. It is perhaps simplistic to migrate a pre-digital taxonomy to a digital environment and to ignore the function of and relationship to digital scholarship for the educator or higher education academic.

Portfolios are a well-researched and proven pedagogical approach to support reflective thinking as well as providing the opportunity for students to demonstrate functioning knowledge in the context of intended learning outcomes within a subject or through a course.

Considering the potential of e-portfolios means that we can also meet the challenges of learning within enhanced subject experiences which we have detailed through the CSU Online Learning and Teaching Model.

CSU Thinkspace is an online blogging and web platform that allows for varied and flexible use of the tool during a course, creating a range of subject experiences that can build into an extensive digital portfolio of learning achievements.

Back in 2013, as part of my work as Courses Director, we established Thinkspace which is a branded version hosted by CampusPress from Edublogs. Awesome. Working with my favourite consultant Jo Kay, the design and support structures were set up. We were ready for the integration of reflective blogging and an integrated approach to an e-portfolio!

We have been using Thinkspace for :

reflective blogging

website creation

digital assessments of various kinds

digital artifacts

open education resources

course and subject specific learning experiences

peer-to-peer engagement

developing digital literacies for working and learning online

providing graduates with evidence of their personal and professional capabilities in their chosen discipline field.

It is really the combination of computing technologies with communication networks that has formed the basis for the digital revolution we are now living in. The internet and digital connections has taken us to a world where billions of people are connected, billions of emails are sent over this network every day and hundreds of millions of people search Google and other search engines for information spread across the plethora of web pages and institutional repositories around the world.

So thinking laterally is probably becoming an essential feature of every educators toolkit. But what do I mean by this? Well, I don’t have all the ideas, but thankfully my personal learning network and my information feeds keep me in touch with the possibilities.

So you know about the Internet Archive, right? My visit today tells me that there have been 484 billion web pages saved over time.

The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library. Its purposes include offering permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format.

Save Page Now Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future. Only available for sites that allow crawlers.

Unique Search

Something I wanted to share from a while ago was Alan November’s post on the Wayback Machine, which he called The Essential unique search tool your students may have never Used.

The Wayback Machine is as basic a reference tool for the Internet Age as a dictionary. When was the last time you saw a student use it?

Alan tells the story of his conference presentation, and the reality check that he offers the audience in terms of digital identity and digital information stored or deleted?? on the web.

The Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to index the Web, runs the Wayback Machine. Since its launch in 1996, the Wayback Machine has saved more than 466 billion web pages and counting—including many pages their owners believed (or hoped?) were long gone.

As many students are recovering from their own sense of naiveté, I ask them a simple question: What happens when you’re reading an article online, and you come across a link and you click on it, but it’s dead? They’ll say, “Well, I just give up.” And I say, “Watch this: You just copy the link, and you paste it into the Wayback Machine, and presto—there’s the website.”

Students are shocked to learn that it’s so simple to recover lost links. This is like knowing there’s a dictionary when you’re learning to read. It is that basic and that important of a reference tool for the Internet Age.

Best get busy and share this information with your students and colleagues – many will not know!

But don’t stop there – use the Internet Archive to find other treasures! Here’s another of piece of fun gaming information shared last year:-

Long before Oculus Rift and MMORPG games existed and way before high-quality graphic cards and roaring sound effects were around there was another type of game genre. DOS. And depending on your age (hello, early 1980s) you may have even played DOS games as a kid. Fortunately for those who like to wax nostalgic the Internet Archive has released nearly 2300 MS-DOS PC games that you can play directly from your browser. Hurray!

There are mountains of old favorites in the release. All DOS games are played through DosBox, which streams to your local computer. This makes it easy to search for a game and then click to play once it’s loaded. All DOS games are emulated—command prompts and boot screens—and one important thing to keep in mind is that you can’t save gameplay. Because it’s running as a virtual machine (of sorts) once you close your browser tab/window the game is over and you’ll need to start from the beginning (boo).

So what we are seeing here is a way to look backwards, digitally, while we move forward.

How we think about our place in the world has been transformed through revolutions of ideas from big thinkers such as Galileo, Darwin and Freud. Philosopher Luciano Floridi, Oxford University believes that we are now into a new revolution in the mass age of information and data. Before you go deeply into any of his academic work, let’s put his thinking into context – with this cheesy video!

It was in Florence during the Renaissance that the West realised we could surpass the knowledge and wisdom of the ancients, ushering in a new idea of the future. Now, in the Age of the Net, the future is changing shape again. Progress looks less like a path upwards that we carefully tread and extend, and more like a constantly forking domain in which ideas are barely born before they’re being reworked and applied in unexpected ways.

Embracing the future requires libraries to face basic tensions between their traditional strengths and the new shape of invention, including the role of privacy, the need to anticipate users’ needs and the role of experts in the networked age.

Embracing new ideas of the future requires libraries to face basic tensions between their traditional strengths and the new shape of invention, including the role of privacy, the need to anticipate users’ needs and the role of experts in the networked age.